The chainsaws arrived at dawn. For two centuries, the banyan tree had stood sentinel over Madaripur's crossroads, its aerial roots cascading like the beard of a Sufi saint. Villagers once gathered beneath its canopy to light candles, tie red threads to its branches, and whisper wishes to the unseen. But on May 5, 2025, the tree's leaves trembled not with monsoon winds but with the growl of engines. The cleric's sermon echoed through the crowd: "This tree is bid'ah—a corruption. Cut it down, and purify the land." By noon, the trunk lay splintered, its roots clawing at air.

This was no mere deforestation. It was an assassination—a calculated silencing of memory, faith, and ecology. To understand why a tree became a threat, we must untangle the Bengal Delta's fraying tapestry, where syncretic traditions collide with ascendant orthodoxy, and where governance falters as polarisation sharpens. 

The Banyan as archive: Eaton's Bengal frontier revisited

Historian Richard M Eaton famously described Bengal's Islamisation as a "slow accretion"—a 500-year osmosis where Sufi mystics, rice-cultivating peasants, and Hindu-Buddhist rituals merged into a distinct spiritual ecosystem. Shrines (mazars) sprouted under banyans, saints became pir-ojhas (healer-guides), and the delta's monsoon rhythms shaped a faith as fluid as its rivers.

But today, clerics invoke bid'ah to oppose this legacy. The Madaripur banyan, like Eaton's syncretic shrines, embodied a living negotiation: Hindu devotees tied threads for fertility; Muslims sought cures for illness; atheists found shade to dream. Its destruction mirrors the recent attacks on 105 Sufi shrines, a rejection of Eaton's "accretion" for Salafist purity.

Ritual, memory, and organised violence

The attack followed a chilling script. First, the clerics recast the tree's rituals as shirk (idolatry), erasing shared history. WhatsApp groups spread fatwas; 200 men gathered. The felling was filmed—a performance of power. Authorities issued a perfunctory police report, but no arrests followed.

Here, anthropologist Michael Taussig's concept of "epistemic murk" resonates: the deliberate blurring of fact and myth to justify state-sanctioned violence. The tree's assassination became a spectacle, its death a ritual to assert dominance over communal memory. As Walter Benjamin observed, "Every monument of culture is also a monument of barbarism." The banyan's stump, now a relic, testifies to this paradox—a site of both cultural erasure and insurgent mourning.

The viral 14-second video of the act, two men sawing the trunk while onlookers stood by, captured this rupture. Shared widely on social media, it became a digital relic of erasure, a modern-day iconoclasm where violence is both documented and normalised.

Governance as ghost: Complicity in cultural erasure

The landowner, eager to build a house, sold the tree for a paltry Tk 1,500 to a local madrasa. "Removing it would be costly," he shrugged, exposing how economic pragmatism and religious institutions collude in the destruction of heritage. When officials finally arrived, they declared the tree "partially cut" and formed a committee—a bureaucratic pantomime of concern. District Forest Officer Jahangir Alam called the banyan a "protected species," yet his intervention came only after the chainsaws had bitten deep.

This hypocrisy mirrors global failures: Maui's 150-year-old banyan, scorched by wildfires, stands as a charred testament to ecological neglect. In Madaripur, as in Hawaii, governance is a ghost—present in rhetoric, absent in action.

Syed Mustafa Siraj's Aleek Manush: Roots of dissent

Syed Mustafa Siraj's novel Aleek Manush (Mythical Man) offers a literary premonition of Madaripur's tragedy. The protagonist, Shafiujjaman, rebels against his father's rigid orthodoxy, symbolising Bengal's clash between syncretic traditions and puritanical zeal. A line haunts: "They fear trees because roots cannot be jailed."

In the novel, rural shrines and banyans serve as sanctuaries for dissent, much like Madaripur's tree. Siraj, an atheist who championed pluralism, frames the banyan as a "silent historian"—its rings encoding centuries of coexistence. The novel's climax, where a shrine is desecrated by fundamentalists, mirrors the real-world. Both narratives reveal how orthodoxy weaponizes fear to fracture communal bonds.

Echoes of environmental carnage

Environmentalist Kazi Faisal's condemnation cuts through the noise: "A century-old tree is not just a tree—it is part of an ecosystem." His words, steeped in urgency, underscore the banyan's role as a keystone species—its figs feeding bats, its hollows sheltering owls. The UN's 2025 Ecocide Report warns that such losses accelerate biodiversity collapse, yet Madaripur's birds now circle a void.

Faisal's grief mirrors global lament: In England, the Sycamore Gap tree—a 200-year-old icon felled in three minutes—sparked national outrage. Its assailants, revelling in viral infamy, embodied the same nihilism as witnessed in Madaripur.

From Tagore to Benjamin

Tagore's poem Subarnarekha mourns a felled banyan: "You were my oldest scribe—your rings held my floods' fury." Madaripur's loss mirrors this elegy. Meanwhile, Walter Benjamin's "angel of history"—staring backward at wreckage while being blown into the future—finds a metaphor in the tree's splintered trunk.

Siraj's Aleek Manush deepens this dialogue. His protagonist's anarchist cry—"The state is a torture machine"—echoes the essay's critique of governance paralysis. The novel's magic realism, where jinns (spirits) haunt uprooted trees, mirrors the uncanny grief of Madaripur's villagers.

Replanting memory

The stump remains. Children still place offerings there—a candy, a scribbled wish. It's a quiet revolt, a refusal to let memory die.

To replant Bengal's future, we must: 

Legislate the sacred: Protect heritage trees as "living monuments," as India's 2002 Biodiversity Act recognises community-conserved ecosystems.

Prosecute cultural ecocide: Jail not just chainsaw-wielders but ideologues, as Britain did for the Sycamore Gap vandals.

Teach syncretism: Revive Eaton's "accretion" in school texts, honouring the delta's pluralistic DNA.

As the bulldozers retreated, a villager whispered: "A tree's soul flies into seeds on the wind." Let those seeds take root—in law, in soil, in us.

Zakir Kibria is a writer and policy analyst. He can be reached at [email protected].

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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